


Night Drive

by mindthetarget



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Developing Relationship, Driving, F/M, Fluff, Road Trips, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 11:18:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4302768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthetarget/pseuds/mindthetarget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Natasha take a directionless, therapeutic road trip. </p><p>“…the stars fill up the black above the landscape in the windshield, and Clint feels as if he is breathing from his soul, not just his lungs. When the rhythm of inhale and exhale falls into sync with the soft, slow pattern of Natasha’s breathing while she sleeps in the passenger seat, he feels as if he is breathing with her soul too...”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Drive

**Author's Note:**

> Soundtrack recommendation: "[Hummed Low](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx-Kx_wwyQ8)" by Odessa.

A long drive can be incredibly soothing. At night, in the blanket of dark and in the stretches between cities, it has a cleansing effect, washing away the noise and clutter of life that builds up inside a person. As the hum of tires on pavement becomes all but a lullaby and the road and striping framed by headlights becomes hypnotic, the stars fill up the black above the landscape in the windshield, and Clint feels as if he is breathing from his soul, not just his lungs.

When the rhythm of inhale and exhale falls into sync with the soft, slow pattern of Natasha’s breathing while she sleeps in the passenger seat, he feels as if he is breathing with her soul too.

These days, having easy access to flying transportation makes it easy to forget that cars are a legitimate way of getting from point A to point B. Someone mentions going somewhere, and a call or text later a jet or a carrier is ready to go, and all thoughts of driving are negated. Or there are people who fly, by tech or by powers of their own, and they can take passengers, so who would ever think to mention a car?

Driving just for the sake of driving seems unknown to the Avengers or S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. The exception is Steve Rogers, of course, who will get on his motorcycle and ride off into the world for days at a time. Nat tells Clint that sometimes Rogers is just going to see the world, to play catch-up as he perpetually does, on all the things that have changed since he was a Capsicle, or all the things he never got to see the first time around, before he became Captain America. Sometimes, though, she says, the supersoldier goes for the quiet, the peace, the solitude.

The road trip is Clint’s idea. He sees how eager to  _go_  Natasha is every time someone mentions the need to travel for a mission, for recon, for research or just to verify or merely check things out. She volunteers quickly, and no one else thinks anything of it because the Black Widow is definitely one of their best qualified for all of the above, and she can pilot anything they hand her the keys to. They don’t see what Clint sees: the ‘get me out of here’ crawling under Nat’s skin, the ‘I need to know I can escape if I want to’ in her shoulders-back march, the ‘too much contact, too many people, too little space’ that threatens to turn into close-quarters combat if someone touches her wrong or steps too close.

After hearing her talk about Rogers’ forays into the world a few times, he wonders if Natasha envies her friend’s habit. When Agent Hill hands down word that the agency is going dark for two weeks—something about checking for leaks and chatter—and there is no immediate order for Hawkeye or Black Widow’s spy skills to participate, Clint catches Natasha in the armory and suggests they take a road trip.

At first, Nat wants to plan the whole thing out. Destinations, routes, schedules, budget, an entire itinerary. Because she doesn’t seem to grasp what he’s wanting to do, Clint goes along with it long enough to get her into the car and out onto the road, and then he immediately drives in the opposite direction of the route she’s mapped.

They argue about it for a while. Well, argue is a strong word. Really, it’s just a little bickering, and Clint is grinning for all of it and Nat is rolling her eyes and smiling by the end. He convinces her, likely because she sees no point in arguing with him that long, that it will be more fun to just “see where the road takes us.”

They’ve been driving for a week now, meandering through the labyrinth of United States roadways. Clint pays only the barest attention to signage other than speed limits when he’s behind the wheel; they traverse farm roads and side streets and find themselves in towns that seem startled to get visitors at all. Once, Natasha wakes from a nap and asks where they are, and he says he doesn’t know—her phone has no signal to find out herself, and only when they stop to buy fruit and veggies from a pair of teenage boys at a roadside stand do they learn they are in Nebraska.

When Natasha takes turns at the wheel, she notices the names of cities, towns, and attractions, but only occasionally pays the speed limit heed. She picks the speed she feels is appropriate, which sometimes actually  _is_ , but sometimes sees Clint cursing as he laughs and planting his feet more firmly against the floor as if that will do any good when they die at one-hundred-and-thirty-one miles an hour. She detours for things like giant plastic dinosaurs at gas stations, ‘world’s best homemade cookies,’ and a sculpture park in South Dakota where they take over a hundred idiotic selfies and Nat gets a little sunburn on her cheeks and shoulders. Clint applies aloe vera gel to the pink spots, grinning when she compares the stuff to fish eggs, and apologizes that he can’t find caviar to suit her Russian superiority. She punches him in the chest for it, but she smiles.

If they feel the need to stop and stretch, they do. They park the car wherever they can and walk, or sometimes go for a run, explore shops if they’re in towns or climb fences and meander through pastures and fields if they’re in the country. Natasha tells Clint facts about national and state parks they hike around and teases him for not knowing more about his own birth country. He teases her for not knowing how to skip stones on a lake, then teaches her for two hours until she can send hers almost as far over the water as he can.

The first several nights, they sleep in motels whenever they are too tired to drive anymore. They say nothing while they shed clothes and fall into bed, spooning together, but in the mornings Natasha always reminds him that she gets the shower first, which is fine because he has the more pressing duty of acquiring coffee before he cares about grooming. They scrounge up breakfast from whatever local fare is available, taking their time about waking, and then slip back into the car when one of them says “Ready?” and the other says “Sure.”

Around the fifth day, Clint thinks that it’s a kind of metaphor for who they are: Natasha is always ready and Clint is always sure.

 

* * *

 

Tonight, the eighth night on the road, after Natasha drifts to sleep, Clint turns the volume on the music down to little more than a murmur and lets the road lead him through the hours. It simply doesn’t occur to him to find a motel, and eventually he realizes that he hasn’t seen another car or a building for at least an hour. He isn’t bothered, and the sky is so clear he wonders why he doesn’t spend more time in the country, if only to remember that the night sky holds more wonders than invading alien forces or gods who don’t know how to cut their hair.

He glances at Natasha. She has curled herself into the seat sideways, facing him with her knees folded up so she can tuck her feet in close, her cheek resting on the seat back. She had her arms crossed around her torso when she fell asleep, but now they’ve loosened and fallen a little. She looks relaxed, and he feels a kind of warm lump in his throat and mouth when the thought comes to him that he doesn’t see her like this but maybe once or twice a year, yet she seems to have slept more peacefully and innocently in the last few days than ever. He is grateful to be able to give her that.

The landscape has become vaguely familiar, though in the dark it’s hard to place why. They’re driving south, he knows that much, and by his estimate they might be in Texas or New Mexico. After the hammer babysitting in Albuquerque, Clint has come to think of any empty, beige-ish landscape with a bored sort of ‘is this New Mexico again?’ remembrance, so he isn’t sure he can trust that it really is New Mexico this time.

It’s not so bad, even if it is New Mexico, right now. He has the road, Natasha’s gentle slumber, and the stars.

Then the wind picks up, and soon there is dust everywhere, the glow of the headlights turning yellow and brown and orange with sand in the air. He has to slow the car considerably to keep track of the road. Natasha doesn’t wake, to his surprise, and again he is touched that she feels safe with him.

Something solid, brown and black and dark because his headlights don’t illuminate much in a pitch black night’s sandstorm, darts out ahead and then disappears again. Clint slows a little more, wary, and sees another shape, and another and another, flit in and out of the howling dust ahead of the car’s bumper.

After twenty minutes and only two miles, he stops the car because the shapes have multiplied by the dozens now and he’s wasting gas, which could be bad if they ran out in the middle of nowhere with no other cars coming by. He does his best to pull over to what he thinks is the side of the road by quite a bit and puts the car in park. As he pulls the keys from the ignition, he says Natasha’s name.

She wakes immediately, sitting up quickly, and is understandably disoriented when she looks around. The car is rocking a little with the force of the wind, sand still blasting about, and Clint grins when she frowns at him as if he has gotten them into trouble.

“You ever see pronghorn?” he asks her.

“What?”

“You know,  _hoooome, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play_?” he sings, grinning more when she gives him that semi-exasperated look. He’s not bad at singing, but he’s not good either. “Technically they’re not antelope, but you know, four legs and antlers and eats grass?”

“What are you talking about?” she asks, but rather than have to try to explain, Clint is able to point out the windshield to show her as the shapes flit by again.

Dozens, maybe by now hundreds spaced out through the sandstorm, of pronghorn have been running past the car. If he was afraid of hitting them in the dark in the middle of nowhere, it might be a little scary, but there’s something incredible about what they’re witnessing now.

He starts up the car again after a few minutes and starts to drive, wasted gas be damned, because he wants Natasha to experience the surrealism with him.

They pass through nearly an hour of blowing sand, of fleet-footed pronghorn darting in and out of sight as if spirits in the storm, the glow of the headlights and the endless howl of wind enveloping their world. It is small and snug and they get a little thrill of adrenalin each time a burst of pronghorn zip through the narrowed space of the sand-blown universe, followed by the appreciation of how alive they are, how alive the world is even when they can’t see it until it’s almost too late.

At last, the sand gets lesser, dissipating into the night with the wind dying down or perhaps left behind them, and the deceptive stretch of the landscape stretches out around them. Scrub brush and prairie and the hint of plateaus and hills, mere forms of blackness in the blackness, replace the golden roar of the sandstorm. The stars return. As they follow the slight curve of the road between two hillocks, Clint hears Natasha’s breath catch.

Ahead of them, in the road, a single pronghorn stands. Its antlers are stubby and sharp and black, white crosses its throat like an athlete’s battle paint smeared in stripes and illuminates its belly and rump, and the rest of it is a warm golden brown. Its hooves are tiny and dainty, blending into the blacktop of the road. Though it stands perpendicular to them, its solid, expressive, mulish muzzle faces them with a calm awareness. Clint slows the car to a stop again and the pronghorn stands there in their headlights.

After a minute, the diminutive buck turns its head, facing off into the night, so its profile is perfectly aligned for them to see.

Natasha lets her breath out, and though there’s no way the pronghorn heard it, it seems like some sort of cosmic cue. The pronghorn takes flight, vanishing into the darkness with an almost wing-footed agility, as if it had never been there at all.

Before he takes his foot off the brake, Clint looks over to Natasha again and this time, he reaches out. She takes his hand and there’s a small hint of smile on her lips. He wonders at the universe, that someone like him and someone like her can be in it, on a road in the middle of nowhere, and together in quiet moments that mean something, that are magical, simply because they share them.

“I want to do this more often,” Natasha says. “I’ve never felt more normal and…unreal at the same time.”

Clint smiles widely. “Only if you let me come with you,” he stipulates.

“I wouldn’t go any other way,” she promises.

He continues to hold her hand as his foot leaves the brake and the car carries them on into the star-laden night.

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted on [tumblr](http://mindthetarget.tumblr.com/post/123402333360/one-shot-night-drive).


End file.
